Arora earned a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Irvine in 2010, followed by a master’s degrees from New York University in 2014 and Columbia University in 2016.
Arora worked as an editor at India.com, Brown Girl Magazine, and Floor Covering Weekly before taking a role as frontpage editor at Yahoo in 2017, then HuffPost in 2018.
New York Times
From 2018 to 2022 Arora worked at the New York Times. Arora was interviewed by Carolyn Ryan and got a contractor role reviewing headlines for the website. In 2019 Arora raised concerns about bias in pieces about chest binding that cited anti-trans site 4thWaveNow and had biased headlines.
Arora was offered a full-time role in London on the global news desk, returning to New York in 2020 and soon being named a senior staff editor. After the Times published a troubling op-ed by Tom Cotton urging a crackdown on George Floyd protestors, Dean Baquet agreed to a meeting with staffers. That led to formalizing of employee affinity groups, including Times Out, where Arora became a leader. These groups soon felt like extensions of management, though, and they were unable to implement things like bringing Trans Journalists Association in for a presentation. After some Times Out members protested an editorial board piece critical of New York Pride for requesting police not to wear uniforms, Carolyn Ryan sided with management. Tensions reached a head when anti-trans activist Pamela Paul of the New York Times book section hired anti-trans activist Jesse Singal to review anti-trans activist Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. Arora decided to send an email to Baquet:
I’m reaching out today as a trans non-binary NYT employee who has been deeply hurt by this week, by the actions of my own employer. I want to preface this by saying never before have I walked into a workplace on day one and felt like I belonged. For me, that’s been the magic of this place. Of this institution, of the journalism we do and the values we uphold.
Reviewing this book was absolutely the right call. Picking a cisgender, transphobic person who has a history of denying gender identity is real and who has hurt and defamed transgender journalists was not the right call. As much as transgender issues have come to the forefront in the last few years as people, we’ve always been here. I’m heartened by the progress the Times has made this past year and the renewed efforts towards DEI goals that are backed by action.
It becomes hard to be so invested in our journalism and our coverage when internally our members share the feeling that the Times is not only not as inclusive as it could be, but is actively doing harm to trans, to trans and queer folks inside the building. I don’t know how to defend this place that I love, the people and reporters and editors I love working with when my existence as a trans person feels like it’s up for debate. I’m writing to you because I respect you a lot. I want to make a difference here. I want to know that the Times hears me and sees me as a queer and trans person of color, and is taking my lived experience seriously. There’s a lot more work to be done, but healing the pain that has been caused would require starting with an acknowledgement of our wrongs with a true desire to understand where we’ve made mistakes. Thank you for taking the time to hear me out, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Baquet replied:
I do want the Times to be an inclusive place. It is important to me personally and professionally, but I have to tell you, I disagree with you in this instance. I know Pamela worked hard to find someone to review the book. There was not a long line of people who were willing to do so, to be honest. And for all the criticism of the choice in the building and on social media, I have not seen much criticism of the actual review. There is another very large principle at play here. The editor of the book review has to have tremendous freedom to make choices. Each of us has political views, personal views, and friends who write books. I think she worked tremendously hard to manage all of those issues. Harper I do hope this disagreement doesn’t make you less proud of the place, the place hasn’t changed.
Arora was assigned an audience development role in California. During an interview for a possible role under deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick, publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s cousin, Dolnick said Baquet shared Arora’s email about Singal with the entire masthead.
Arora felt that was the cue to leave, and in 2022, Arora took an editor role at Apple News.
The editorial board (May 18, 2021). A Misstep by the Organizers of Pride.New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/opinion/nyc-pride-police-parade.html
Pinker is frequently involved in academic controversies, particularly around race, gender, and eugenics. Pinker is a key connector in the so-called intellectual dark web, a gateway to the far right.
Background
Steven Arthur Pinker was born in 1954.
Pinker moved to Harvard in 2003 after 20 years at MIT working in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. Pinker is the author of many books on mind and language, including:
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
How the Mind Works
Pinker is a hereditarian, believing that genes are far more important than environment in shaping who we are. Pinker falsely claims that ideological opponents believe in a blank slate, where everyone begins the same until social forces change us.
“With a mixture science, humanity, and fine writing, J. Michael Bailey illuminates the mysteries of sexual orientation and identity in the best book yet written on the subject. The Man Who Would Be Queen may upset the guardians of political correctness on both the left and the right, but it will be welcomed by intellectually curious people of all sexes and sexual orientations. A truly fascinating book.” — Steven Pinker, Peter de Florez Professor, MIT, and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”
Joseph Henry Press marketing materials (unattributed):
J Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is an engaging book on the science of sexual orientation. …highly sympathetic to gay and transsexual men…” — The Guardian (London), June 28, 2003
Below is the full review:
J Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen (Joseph Henry) is an engaging book on the science of sexual orientation. Though highly sympathetic to gay and transsexual men, it has ignited a firestorm by claiming that transsexuals are not women trapped in men’s bodies but have either homosexual or autoerotic motives.
Pinker’s writing was also used in Bailey’s since-canceled Human Sexuality class.
Anti-trans logrolling
Anti-trans activists and extremists frequently defend Pinker with the same zeal seen in defenses of other celebrity transphobes like J.K. Rowling.
Jesse Singal defended Pinker in the New York Times, writing: “The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.”
Lisa Selin Davis is an American author and “gender critical” activist involved in anti-transgender extremism. Since 2013, Davis has become a key anti-trans voice in American media, part of the movement’s “parental rights” faction. Davis has a gender diverse child and is unaccepting of the child’s interest in gender transition.
Davis’ attacks on the trans rights movement center on several gender critical tactics:
using Davis’ own child to draw sharp distinctions between the “tomboy” identity and other gender diverse youth identities
amplifying outliers and edge cases in controversies to derail broader discussions
Davis claims “there is a dominant narrative about trans kids that the media is promoting.” According to Davis, this alleged narrative is merely “mantras by activists” and based on “feeling over fact.” Davis claims to have concerns about the affirmative model of care and is troubled that fellow anti-trans activists can no longer publish their conservative beliefs without consequence.
Davis claims to be a liberal who is part of the “silenced center.” Davis disavows being part of the gender critical world or the gender affirming world and simply wants to “diversify the media narrative.” So far, Davis’ “viewpoint diversity” efforts have largely been the promotion of extremist clinicians, cultural critics, and activists with similar gender critical beliefs.
Background
Davis was born January 18, 1972. Davis’ parent Peter is a musician who plays in a group called Annie and the Hedonists. Davis’ youth was spent in a Massachusetts suburb with parent Helaine Selin (born 1946), a librarian and author.
Helaine Selin worked at Hampshire College and helped “nepo baby” Davis attend, then graduate in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in film studies. Davis then moved to New York City and lived with sibling Benjamin Lazar Davis, a musician. Davis built props at Nickelodeon for a few years, then earned an MFA in writing from Arizona State University in 2003.
Davis has edited a number of publications and websites, including Upstate House magazine, Senior Planet, KGB Bar, upstater.net, and brownstoner.com. Davis is the author of young adult novels Belly (2005) and Lost Stars (2016). Davis stopped writing in the genre, alleging it was no longer possible to write about characters from other demographic groups. Davis’ non-fiction writing has appeared in several publications, including Grist, The Wall Street Journal, Time, the New York Times, Quillette, and Quartz.
Davis and spouse Alex F. Sherwin live in New York with their two children, Enna and Athena. Davis’ 2020 book Tomboy is dedicated to them.
2013 Parenting article
In 2013, Davis wrote a piece for Parenting just before the magazine closed, titled “My Daughter Wants to be a Boy!” The title was stealth edited in 2017 to “My Daughter Is a Tomboy!” and the article was edited to remove some identifying information. The article was removed from the Parenting.com website in 2018, though the site remains online as part of a 2021 asset transfer from Meredith to Dotdash. The original version describes Davis’ child:
She insisted on being Spiderman for Halloween, and on getting light-up superhero sneakers “like my friend Luca’s” when she needed new shoes. They told us at school that she gravitated toward the boys, and though she is quite small for her age, and not particularly hearty, they told us she could hold her own with the rowdy bunch of them.
And again, I thought, “How great is she?”
Well, okay, 90% of me said that. The other 10% thought, “uh-oh.” As she started to announce in ways both subtle and direct that she’s a boy, and ask me questions like “Why can’t boys have vaginas and girls have penises?” the ratio of heartwarming to heart-sinking has shifted.
Let me say that I don’t hold particularly conventional views about gender or sexuality. There are so many lesbians in my family that I fully expect either or both of my daughters to be gay (though of course I will love and accept them if they turn out to be heterosexual). But there is something about having the only girl who won’t play princess, the only girl in the school who thinks and says she’s a boy, that has shaken me a bit. Dressing like a boy? Cool. Thinking you actually are a boy? Way more complicated. […]
Some of my fears for Enna-as-boy are rooted in reality. It’s a much harder way to move through the world, identifying with the gender you weren’t assigned at birth.
2017 New York Times op-ed
In 2017, Davis wrote an op-ed in the New York Times insisting that their child is not transgender, but instead a “tomboy.” Davis says author Jennifer Finney Boylan gave it the thumbs up, and Davis claims the whole community on Twitter then gave it the thumbs up.
Following its warm reception among conservatives and anti-trans thought leaders, Davis was given a book deal and turned the piece into the 2020 book Tomboy. Despite a book deal and many subsequent writing gigs and media appearances, Davis claims to have been “cancelled” for the op-ed. Davis reportedly met with Chase Strangio and Kate Bornstein about Davis’ “concerns about the dominant narrative” that affirming care benefited gender diverse youth.
Drawing parallels to the response to Jesse Singal’s transphobic 2018 piece in The Atlantic, Davis claims to be part of a group of “left wing” people who meet surreptitiously to plan strategies that undermine affirming care and promote the “Dutch protocol” for gender diverse youth, a gatekeeping model of care sometimes called “watchful waiting.”
2020 book Tomboy
In an expansion of the 2017 op-ed, Davis’ thesis is that masculine girls have recently disappeared from the cultural landscape. This erasure narrative about “tomboys” and lesbians is a major talking point among gender critical and trans-exclusionary separatists.
Cultural criticism
The narrative Davis puts forth is permeated with metaphors of disease and impairment. Davis describes some gender diverse youth as being influenced by peers and having “comorbidities” that should be cured before they are approved for gender affirming health services. Davis has concerns that medical transition is being used “as a panacea for other mental health issues.”
Davis’ binary view about transitioning to “the opposite sex” presents trans rights as a moral dilemma that could harm cisgender people: “Do we want to make decisions that are worse for the majority of people but they benefit a small group?”
Davis has criticized Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatrist Jack Turban for asking the media not to use the term “detransition.” Davis was offended after getting criticized by Turban during an interview request. Davis uses the term “activist” as a thought-terminating pejorative for anyone who does not share similar views, even subject matter experts like Strangio and Turban.
Meanwhile, Davis supports numerous controversial disease models of sex and gender diversity, including Ray Blanchard‘s sex disease “autogynephilia” and Kenneth Zucker‘s diseases like “gender identity disorder” and “gender dysphoria.” Davis has spoken with ex-trans activists like James Shupe and supports conservative trans people such as Aaron Kimberly and Scott Newgent.
2022 Quillette profile of Erica Anderson
Davis complained after The Nation noted that gender critical publication Quillette was deemed transphobic for promoting “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” and other conservative beliefs about gender diverse youth. Davis told fellow anti-trans activist Benjamin Boyce, “I don’t read Quillette, but I know they have a more diverse media narrative around this issue.”
A couple of months later, Davis profiled conservative transgender clinician Erica Anderson in Quillette. Anderson began litigating conservative clinical views about trans and gender diverse youth in the press in 2021. Because USPATH had specifically stated that clinical disputes should be discussed among professionals and not litigated in the lay press, Anderson resigned from USPATH in a move to get more attention for these conservative clinical views from people like Davis.
2022 Newsweek op-ed
In a classic case of false balance and “bothsidesism,” Davis made the case against affirmative care in a Newsweek piece titled “What Both Sides Are Missing About the Science of Gender-Affirming Care.” As usual, one of the best ways to analyze Davis’ bias is via the proportion of text and links. These pieces always start of with a veneer of journalism, then quickly make a case for one position. Unlike the infamous 2018 Atlantic piece by Jesse Singal, at least this one is labeled opinion.
Davis cites 3 neutral sources and 7 sources that reflect expert medical consensus. Davis cites 35 sources that dispute expert medical consensus and support the gender critical view, which could basically be summarized thus: being trans is a rapidly spreading disease that should be monitored and controlled by a state-run healthcare system overseen by conservative clinicians and legislators, where even one bad outcome must be prevented at all costs. Even if the cost is 100 good outcomes. Others with Davis’ cis-centric point of view would add even if the cost is prosecuting the families and doctors who work toward good outcomes.
2022 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed
This piece purports to condemn extremist anti-trans legislators. It also suggests that mainstream medical consensus is the extremism at the other end of the political spectrum. Davis once again praises federal healthcare systems that require children to travel to centralized clinics run by state-funded gatekeepers in hopes of receiving medical care capped by a federal budget. Despite extensive evidence about the drawbacks of such systems for minorities seeking health services, like the US Veteran’s Administration or Canada’s CAMH, Davis is convinced that systems like Sweden’s, or worse, the UK’s will prevent rare cases of regret.
2022 Skeptic special edition
Anti-trans activist Michael Shermer paid other members of the gender critical faction in the skeptic community to present their version of “the debate” about trans people. No trans contributors were invited. Joining Shermer in this attack were Harriet Hall, Carol Tavris, and Davis, whose piece is titled “Trans Matters: An Overview of the Debate, Research, and Policies.” Davis bristles about being lumped in with “conservative, transphobic bigots” and claims support for affirming models of care “is now a test of loyalty” among its supporters.
April 2022 Quillette piece
It was inevitable that Davis would become a regular contributor to Quillette’s steady stream of anti-trans articles. Davis’ efforts continued with a dogwhistle piece about “the encroachment of ideology on medicine by activists” and the “propaganda surrounding medical literature.” While the piece seems to condemn the national deluge of anti-trans legislation criminalizing trans healthcare, Davis’ real point is to claim that the government has gone too far in supporting trans youth. Davis cites several examples gleaned from anti-trans parenting forums.
September 2022 Boston Globe piece
Davis continues to place the same article in any outlet that will take it, in this case repurposing a Substack piece in the Boston Globe, which was then reprinted in the New York Post as “Kid gender guidelines not driven by science.” Davis blames WPATH for bomb threats against trans-affirming children’s hospitals, because they did not publish better Standards of Care. Davis quotes anti-trans allies including Julia Mason of Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine and James Cantor, formerly of CAMH. Davis once again holds up federally controlled conservative gatekeeping as the ideal protocol.
Podcast
Beginning in 2022, Davis began a series of interviews, mostly with conservative and anti-transgender guests.
August 22, 2023: Heterodox Trans People #6: Phil Illy
Davis, Lisa Selin (2013). “My Daughter Wants to be a Boy!” [retitled in 2017 as “My Daughter Is a Tomboy!” and removed in 2018] Parenting http://www.parenting.com/article/tomboy [archive]
Davis, Lisa Selin (April 18, 2017). My Daughter Is Not Transgender. She’s a Tomboy. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/opinion/my-daughter-is-not-transgender-shes-a-tomboy.html
Davis, Lisa Selin (December 19, 2021). Tomboys, trans boys and ‘West Side Story.’Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-12-19/tomboys-west-side-story-anybodys-gender-nonconforming-trans-people
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
Karen Davis is an American musician and anti-transgender activist.
Background
Davis earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University. In college, Davis became aware of radical feminism an got involved in feminist activism.
From 1992 to 1997 Davis worked as a kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn. Davis has been a working musician and music teacher since 1997. In 2005, Davis teamed up with singer/guitarist Joe Pla to perform classic rock and blues locally.
Davis was raised Catholic and has a sibling who identifies as gay.
Anti-trans activism
Davis is reportedly “fascinated and appalled by the Gender Wars.” Davis was radicalized on reddit via suspended gender critical subreddits.
In 2020 Davis started a YouTube series called “You’re Kiddin’, Right?” The account was later suspended for hate speech.
“Christina Buttons” is the pen name of Christina Berry, an American writer, former sex worker, illustrator, and anti-transgender activist who wrote articles for anti-trans publication The Daily Wire until 2023. Berry joined the anti-trans Manhattan Institute in 2024.
Background
Christina “Tina” Berry is reportedly “from a small town in Alabama” and grew up in the San Diego area.
Berry stated, “I received many diagnoses throughout my life, the most recent being Asperger’s syndrome at age 30.” Starting in middle school, Berry felt ostracized and reported the following problems that required therapy:
body dysmorphia
dermatillomania
insomnia
obsessive-compulsive habits
self-cutting
anorexia
major depressive disorder
trips to “emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, outpatient programs, and group homes”
monotone voice
“limited eye contact”
“flat affect”
“stumbling while walking and almost falling”
“a large number of atypical perceptual experiences”
“social immaturity”
“significant inflexibility in her thinking”
“difficulty identifying feelings”
“tendency to express emotions indirectly and impulsively”
“emotionally disturbed”
drug and alcohol use
groomed and raped at age 15 by a 47 year old
“After running away from two lower-security residential treatment facilities, flunking out of a wilderness program in Idaho, and several more psychiatric hospital stays, I arrived at my final destination: a lockdown psychiatric residential treatment center in Utah called Provo Canyon School, where I would live for a year.”
After returning home and getting a GED, Berry moved in with a romantic partner and began doing sex work. As a young adult, Berry appeared in pornography as “Rita Lovely” and “Cute Courtney.”
Berry worked at Moonbow Publishing as a contract illustrator, which began a turning point away from some of these earlier self-destructive behaviors.
Anti-transgender activism
Berry stated, “I became a journalist after discovering the stories of detransitioners—stories that deeply resonated with my own struggles with mental health and identity.”
Berry plans to continue this anti-trans work with a book titled The Parent’s Survival Guide to Gender Ideology and a website genderdebunked.com.
In 2024, Berry joined the Manhattan Institute, which led to revelations about Berry’s work in hardcore pornography.
Over the course of this activism, Berry began a relationship with anti-trans activist Colin Wright.
2023 Daily Wire resignation
Berry covered transgender issues for The Daily Wire, switching to “Christina Buttons” after starting. In 2023, Berry resigned from The Daily Wire over its increasingly inflammatory anti-trans rhetoric, particularly that of Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles:
I’m leaving The Daily Wire. I work hard getting the facts right and using precise language because of the heated nature of the gender debate, with so much at stake, while their pundits dump gasoline all over it for entertainment and clicks.
As an independent journalist I will continue my commitment to factual and rigorous reporting on gender ideology and pediatric gender medicine, with the goal of reaching people across the political spectrum. You can help support my journalism by donating.
I’ve already begun receiving inquiries from left-wing publications to see if I’ll give them dirt. As a company, The Daily Wire is a fantastic place to work, they treat their employees extremely well, their editorial team is top notch and everyone I have ever interacted with there is wonderful. I am leaving because I want to reach people on the center-left and lately I’ve felt there has been a distinct increase in inflammatory rhetoric from some of The Daily Wire’s personalities that make it more difficult to accomplish that.
Why? I didn’t misrepresent their views. They made extremely controversial public statements, doubled down on them, and I left so that I could express my opinions on them. My loyalty is to the people who are trying to improve the situation with gender medicine, not inflame it.
I would never use the word transgenderism to describe gender ideology. It was either a sloppy choice from not having done enough research or it was intentionally meant to inflame. Most people believe that being transgender is the same as being gay. That’s why I expend so much energy trying to inform people on why “gender identity” has no biological basis. Furthermore, “eradicating” gender ideology completely from all aspects of life is not realistic, nor attainable and amounts to conservative virtue signaling. We have to be specific about what “gender identity” ideology is, where it came from, what the tenets are, where it should not be taught (K-12) or accommodated (sports, prisons, etc) otherwise you drive mass hysteria. Most reasonable people would agree with all of these points if they were given the opportunity to have them be explained.
I know her from college. This girl was and very likely still IS seriously troubled. She had a few break downs in front of us all at a classmates’ home, like people saw her do incredibly inappropriate shit that I will not repeat here out of respect for her. She then went on to do porn for a while (not kidding), then decided she wanted to move to Europe and got married to a Swiss dude only to dump him and run back home..THEN she reappeared wanting to be a microbiologist (or some kind of scientist) then moved on to illustration…my point with saying all of this is that she’s a lost grifter, clinging to anything that will get her love, admiration, and attention. I feel bad for her honestly, because she was always so sweet and kind… but not that bad anymore since she decided to align herself with fascists. I thought she was ok up til now. Bummer.
Selected writing by Berry
Buttons, Christina (December 10, 2024). Crazy is You or Me, Amplified.Buttons Lives https://www.buttonslives.news/p/crazy-is-you-or-me-amplified
Berry, Christina (September 7, 2022). Alabama Nonprofit Fighting Underage Gender Treatments Says They’re Being Targeted By ‘Unprecedented’ DOJ Subpoena. Daily Wire https://www.dailywire.com/news/alabama-nonprofit-fighting-underage-gender-treatments-says-theyre-being-targeted-by-unprecedented-doj-subpoena [archive]
Berry, Christina (September 6, 2022). Nearly 1 In 4 Democratic Voters Believe Men Can Get Pregnant: Poll. Daily Wire https://www.dailywire.com/news/nearly-1-in-4-democratic-voters-believe-men-can-get-pregnant-poll [archive]
Buttons, Christina (March 7, 2023). Why I’m Leaving The Daily Wire.Reality’s Last Stand https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-im-leaving-the-daily-wire
Julia Malott is a Canadian software manager and conservative activist. Malott has published opinion pieces in conservative publications and has attended anti-trans rallies and conferences.
Background
Malott was born in 1990 and grew up in a conservative Christian family in Hanover, Ontario, a rural community west of Toronto:
Throughout my teens and twenties, I was plagued with two mental health issues—the first was the gender dysphoria I knew I had but the second was the baggage of intense shame I internalized by NOT dealing with my dysphoria from childhood. That second one is such an important part and has huge implications on how my teenage years and adulthood played out. I think it’s easy for us to ignore the latter and focus only on the dysphoria.
When I was 14 years old, before even meeting my future wife, I made the decision that I was not going to transition. I knew I was beyond the age where puberty blockers would have prevented the masculinization of aspects of my body such as height, bone density, and my voice lowering, so my chances of passing as female were slim.
Nothing in the realm of hormones and surgeries were financially subsidized and I knew just how huge of an expense this would be throughout my late teens and twenties.
[…] The biggest deterrent of them all—I would have had to face telling my Christian parents how I felt about my gender. I knew they would never support me in pursuing a transition, and I knew that doing so would devastate them and humiliate me.
Malott and future spouse met when Malott was 16 years old. Two years later, Malott came out but claimed not to want to make a gender transition. They got married and did not have any children together.
Malott earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Waterloo in 2015, then did database management and software development for Open Text, Manulife Financial, Desire2Learn, and Brock Solutions. Malott handled web accessibility for the City of Woodstock from 2015 to 2019, then held product management roles at eSolutionsGroup, OCAS, and Bonfire Interactive.
Malott had a change of heart about transition after a few years. After they separated in 2018, Malott made a gender transition soon after and now lives in Kitchener.
Activism
Malott quickly found a conservative and anti-trans audience eager to uplift someone whose views reflected theirs, including
In 2023, Mallot began the podcast Alotta Thoughts. Guests include:
April 10 & 20: Catherine Kronas and Chanel Pfahl
May 12: Catherine Kronas, Eva Kurilova, Neil Dorin, and Lois Cardinal
June 7: Audra Facinelli
In 2023 Malott attended an anti-trans conference held by Genspect and seemed surprised that many attendees and online observers made cruel comments about Malott’s presence, appearance, and sexuality. Both Malott and “autogynephilia” activist “Phil Illy” were called “autogynephiles” and told they should not be parading their sexual fetish in front of attendees. Some attendees said they had a trauma response from being exposed to Malott without consent, as they felt they were being forced to participate in Malott’s sexual script. Some of Malott’s critics identify as “trans widows” whose oath-breaking spouses left them to transition, exactly as Malott did. The presence of Malott and “Phil Illy” was dubbed “AGPgate” and discussed widely in transphobic circles.
John Derbyshire is a British-American author, eugenicist, and anti-transgender activist. Derbyshire is a member of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a conservative-run eugenics think tank closely associated with promoting harmful views about trans people, particularly the group’s promotion of the transphobic 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen by HBI member J. Michael Bailey.
Background
John Derbyshire was born on June 3, 1945. Derbyshire attended the Northampton School for Boys and earned a degree from University College London. Derbyshire was a computer programmer for stock market speculators before becoming a full-time writer. Derbyshire’s work has appeared in National Review, The New Criterion, The American Conservative , Unz Review, Taki’s Magazine, VDARE, and The Washington Times.
“Lost in the Male”: review by John Derbyshire [excerpt]
Part Three is the book’s most difficult section, because it deals with the rarest and most puzzling aspect of male effeminacy: According to Bailey, less than one man in 12,000 is transsexual, a condition defined simply by “the desire to become a member of the opposite sex,” whether or not that desire has led to actual surgery. The striking finding here is that there are two quite distinct types of men who wish they were women, distinguished by the choice of erotic object. On the one hand there are “homosexual transsexuals,” who desire masculine men—heterosexual men, for preference—and who dress and behave like women to attract them. And then there is the “autogynephilic transsexual,” a man whose erotic attention is fixed on the idea of himself as a woman.
The strangeness of this latter type is captured nicely in the title of Bailey’s chapter on them: “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies.” An autogynephile is essentially a heterosexual man whose object of desire is an imaginary feminine creature which happens to be himself… or herself, depending on how you look at it. Such a person was usually not effeminate as a child, has likely been married, and does not show typically homosexual preferences in career or entertainment choices. The historian and travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris, to judge from her autobiographical book Conundrum, belongs to this category. The consummation of sexual desire presents obvious difficulties for the autogynephile. Indeed, it is occasionally fatal: Around 100 American men die every year from “autoerotic asphyxia,” which seems to arise from a conjunction of masochism and autogynephilia—the two conditions are related in some way not well understood.
All of these types—girlish boys, male homosexuals, transsexuals of both types—are of course human beings, who, like the rest of us, must play the best game they can with the cards Nature has dealt them. No decent person would wish to inflict on them any more unhappiness than their mismatched bodies and psyches have already burdened them with. At the same time, there is circumstantial evidence that complete acceptance and equality for all sexual orientations may have antisocial consequences, so that the obloquy aimed at sexual variance by every society prior to our own may have had some stronger foundation than mere blind prejudice. Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones. The courts of at least two English kings offer support to this thesis, as does the postwar British Secret Service, and more recently the Roman Catholic priesthood. I should like to see some adventurous sociologist research these outward aspects with as much diligence and humanity as Michael Bailey has applied to his study of the inward ones.
Derbyshire’s positive review (as with Dan Seligman in Forbes) shows why this book will be embraced by conservatives as part of the new “calculated compassion” movement in the face of significant and unstoppable LGBT political advances in the last 30 years. Seems they hope to slow things down at least.
As expected, uber-conservative Derbyshire loves Bailey. In discussing the first two sections, he brings up Bailey’s cloacal extrophy story, his woefully uninformed “homosexual voice” thinking and clueless conjectures on why certain jobs in the gender ghettoes go to gay men.
Then he gets to the part on trans people, which Derbyshire sums up perfectly and exposes the book for what it is. Bailey has been claiming he never called us men, but that’s not how anyone else sees it, whether they’re Derbyshire, yours truly, or other psychologists. Derbyshire also picks up on how Bailey claims there’s a connection between transsexual women and 25 men a year who die from self-strangulation while masturbatingin panties.
The 1 in 12,000 number cited is way off, as Bailey is about to find out. I would estimate several thousand assimilated trans women in the Chicago area alone, and probably five times that many who would fit in Bailey’s definition of anyone seriously thinking about transition. Bailey should be very pleased to see that conservatives like Tammy Bruce and John Derbyshire are taking up Anne Lawrence’s “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies”cliche, which dovetails perfectly with the Man Who Would Be Queen title.
Subsequent commentary (2003)
Derbyshire sees gay people as “intrinsically subversive” when allowed in positions of power (see the Califia-Rice quotation on my “illegal immigrants” page for how those of us who pass get painted as moles and traitors).
Derbyshire’s review came about the same way as Bailey’s Amazon shill reviews, it turns out. A little logrolling. Both were published by National Academies Press: Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession:and Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen both came out in 2003.
The Derb is well-known for anti-gay commentary, and he’s taking us to task for being those “‘transgender’ extremists,” miserable ingrates who just aren’t satisfied with the crumbs from the table.
The homosexual-rights activists are in a period of overshoot. They have banished the old regime of illegality, persecution and blackmail, and a good thing too. Now, however, they are trying to effect radical changes in society, changes which huge numbers of people will not stomach. As I have said before: “Homosexuals would, I believe, be wise to lower the volume, cherish their private lives, withdraw the more contentious litigation, and stop ‘pushing the envelope.’ Envelopes can break.”
There’s also this gem (interesting in light of my business partner Calpernia’s boyfriend Barry, who was gay-bashed on base for months before he was literally beaten to death with a baseball bat):
The extremist-homosexualist lobbies are extremely skilled at this. Just look at the word “gay-bashing.” It ought to mean whacking someone over the head with a baseball bat. What it actually means–is taken to mean by ordinary Americans–is the utterance of anything opposed to the extremist-homosexualist cause. (It was used against me just five minutes ago in an e-mail, because I wondered aloud about diseases specific to male homosexuals.)
And last, before we get to the review, an anecdote about his wacky adventures with Bailey (emphasis mine):
June 12, 2003 blog post
The Man Who Would Be Late
Yes, it’s true: NRODT [archive link] really did assign me to review Michael Bailey’s book about effeminate men. I urge you to do one, or better yet both, of the following: (a) get a subscription to NRODT so you can read my review, or (b) buy Michael’s book. As well as the obvious reasons to buy it (it’s a good book, full of fascinating observations and, so far as I could discern, agenda-free), there is also the fact that Michael, the nicest guy you could ever wish to meet, and a very conscientious researcher, is being vilified by militant trans-gender extremists. Here is an anecdote about the book. It happens that Michael and I share the same publisher. We had adjoining tables at Book Expo America in Los Angeles the other day. The drill is, you get half an hour at a table in a huge hall, where people line up in front of the tables to get a free book (this is a trade show) signed by the author. It’s all timed very precisely by the organizers, as they have a LOT of authors to get through. Well, I was waiting in the green room with my publisher’s publicity lady, to do my signing at 12:30. Michael was scheduled to sign at the same time, but he was late. It got to be 12:15, 12:20, and the publicity lady was getting worried. Derb: “I sure hope he gets here on time. A long line of angry transsexuals doesn’t bear thinking about…” Fortunately Michael showed up with a minute to spare.
More fun with The Derb
From his blog work on the National Review’s The Corner. Links in text added by me.
Derbyshire, John (November 16, 2003). Culture wars: Report from Derb bunker. National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_11_16_corner-archive.asp [archive]
November 16, 2003
CULTURE WARS: REPORT FROM DERB BUNKER [John Derbyshire]
Following the “Derbophobe” link at the end of today’s column, a number of readers have e-mailed in to ask what on earth I have done to tick off this Lynn Conway person so very comprehensively.
It’s a long story but here is the gist of it.
There is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, Michael Bailey. Michael’s research specialty is the psychology of “gender identity.” He studies–in a formal, peer-reviewed academic sense–things like homosexuality, transsexualism, and so on. Earlier this year he published a book about his research, titled The Man Who Would Be Queen. I am slightly acquainted with Michael and his work–we are both members of a certain invitation-only e-list dealing with matters of human variation from biological, psychological and sociological perspectives. I therefore volunteered to review his book for National Review. My review duly appeared in the June 30 issue of NRODT this year. Here it is.
Now, the last part of Michael’s book deals with male transsexuals–men who wish to become women. In it, he subscribes to the theory (which did not originate with him) that there are two quite distinct types of male transsexual. The first type is pretty straightforward, just a particularly effeminate kind of homosexual, who wants to be a woman in order to attract male sex partners–heterosexual ones for preference. The second type, however, is much stranger. This is the “autogynephile”–a masculine, basically heterosexual man, whose erotic attention is fixated on the image of himself as a woman. In the studies Michael (and others) have done, this type appears quite distinct from the other. Autogynephiles, for example, are likely to have been married to normal women and to have fathered children by them. They differ from the other type–the “homosexual transsexual”–in all sorts of other ways, too, that show up clearly in life histories and psychological tests.
Now, this is all psychological theory. It may be wrong–though on the evidence Michael presents, in his book and elsewhere, it seems to this non-specialist that he has a pretty good case. This theory, however, is pure poison to those autogynephiles who, like Lynn Conway, have hadsex-reassignment surgery. They take very strong exception to the implication that they are fundamentally males–and heterosexual males at that! WE ARE WOMEN! They scream. FULLY FEMININE WOMEN! To say that they take strong exception to Michael’s work is, in fact, to understate the situation. They are spitting furious with Bailey, and have launched a huge campaign against him and anyone associated with him.
The scale of their campaign is tremendous. Anyone who ever shook hands with Michael Bailey is being tracked down and “exposed” via materials like those I linked to. This campaign is very well financed and has pulled in some big guns–the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, is carrying out a “hate crimes” investigation. Our publisher has been lobbied ferociously to withdraw Michael’s book (Michael’s publicist, who is also mine, has been a target of their campaign) and Northwestern has also been threatened with various kinds of action if they do not shut Michael’s mouth.
What’s this got to do with me? Well, I gave Michael’s book a friendly review, see, so I must be part of the Axis of Evil. In fact, these lunatics have erected a huge conspiracy theory about myself and Michael, based on the fact that, wait for it, we have the same publisher!!! It follows, you see, that Michael and I meet secretly in a basement somewhere every Friday to plot further insults and outrages against these autogynephiles. I’m not kidding. This stuff is bizarre.
In fact, other than belonging to the same e-list, Michael and I are not acquainted. I have met him just once: his book came out at the same time as mine, and our publisher sent us both to BookExpo in Los Angeles this summer, along with all their other authors whose books had just appeared. Michael does not, in fact, altogether approve of me. He is–as his book clearly shows–sympathetic to people with “gender identity” problems, and regards me as a primitive homophobe. (Imagine! Me!!)
A great many other facts on Lynn Conway’s website are wrong, too. I have never, for example, written a book about yachting, and I have never heard of half the people she names as being part of the great Bailey-Derbyshire conspiracy to present autogynephiles as essentially male.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Lynn Conway is nuts. She and her pals have money, though, and energy, and a big cheering section in the “gay rights” crowd, so I shall probably end up in jail for some kind of “hate crime” before they are through with me.
OK, it’s all a bit of a storm in a teacup. It does illustrate, though, the savagery of the “gender issues” and “gay rights” campaigners. These people are pure totalitarians, intent on shutting up and destroying anyone who goes against their party line–even someone as generally sympathetic as Bailey. They are absolutely unscrupulous, very well funded, and have powerful friends in Congress and the judiciary–it is they who are driving this new “hate crimes” legislation.
As an opinion journalist, I am fair game, and I can take care of myself. Michael, though, is a scientist, a “retired and uncourtly scholar,” quite unused to this kind of vituperation and misrepresentation. His work ought to be validated, or disproved, via the usual processes of discussion and peer review.
Lynn Conway and her gang couldn’t care less about any of that. Like the rest of the “gay rights” and “gender issues” crowd, they want to shut down all discussion and debate. Fundamentally they are extreme narcissists, who react with blind unreasoning fury when their precious self-esteem is pricked. They don’t want peer review; they don’t want science; they don’t want discussion; they want blood. This is real culture war here, and if we lose it, we shall lose our freedoms.
November 17, 2003
TRANSSEXUALS VS. BAILEY-DERB AXIS OF EVIL [John Derbyshire]
Many readers have expressed great interest in the flap ove Michael Bailey’s book, which I sketched out in a long Corner post yesterday. Michael Bailey himself has set up a site to give his account of the affair. You can, by the way, read Michael’s book free on the web–there is a link somewhere in that site.
TRANSSEXUALS VS. DERB [John Derbyshire]
A reader (one of several expressing the same sentiment): “Why do you play along with this person’s [i.e. Lynn Conway’s, the male-to-female transsexual who put up that ‘Derbophobe’ web site] pathology by calling him a “she”? As a woman, I can tell you one thing for sure: He is not a woman, just a poor, deluded amputee.”
In my opinion, this is not an easy call. You can make a polemical point–and, if the offending theory is true, be technically correct–by referring to Lynn Conway as “he.” I think my own preference for “she” just derives from a strong, old-fashioned attachment to good manners.
Now, you could argue that, given the vituperation heaped on my head by Lynn Conway, she has forfeited any right to good manners on my part. I just don’t agree. If she considers herself a woman, and has gone to all the pain and expense of having an operation to make her feel more like a woman, I think common courtesy dictates that we call her what she wishes to be called, however deluded we may think she is. To start referring to her as “he” just seems a bit spiteful and nyah-nyah-ish, even if technically correct. Perhaps I’m not making a good case here; perhaps I’m not sure about this; but that is kind of the point. When in doubt, stick with good manners.
This is related, in some way I can’t be bothered to figure out, to the question of whether to pronounce your enemy’s name properly. I used to work with a woman who was perfectly detestable–everyone detested her, she was a sneak and a suck-up, incompetent and lazy, but highly skilled at ingratiating herself with management. Her name was “Diane,” which in England is pronounced “die-AN.” Well, she had this big thing about how she wanted everyone to say “DEE-an.” Naturally we all referred to her as “die-AN.” Now, twenty years on, with the sage maturity of my years, I think I would have said “DEE-an,” while working very hard indeed to get her fired.
[By the way, “Derbyshire” is pronounced “DAH-bi-shuh.” That’s “DAH-bi-shuh”–everybody got that?] Posted at 02:31 PM
Eugenics
Derbyshire has been reading the work of his eugenicist friends like J. Michael Bailey:
Now, the trend in current research on homosexuality, if I have understood it correctly, suggests that the homosexual orientation is indeed mostly congenital — the result of events in the mother’s womb, or in early infancy, with perhaps some slight genetic predisposition. The thing is, in short, mainly biochemical — part of a person’s physical make-up.
Supposing this is true, let us conduct a wee thought experiment — admittedly a fanciful one. A young woman in the late stages of pregnancy, or carrying a small infant, shows up at her doctor’s office. “Doctor,” she asks, “is there some kind of test you can do to tell me if my child is likely to become a homosexual adult?” The doctor says yes, there is. “And,” the woman continues, “suppose the test is positive — would that be something we can fix? I mean, is there some sort of medical, or genetic, or biochemical intervention we can do at this stage, to prevent that happening?” The doctor says yes, there is. “How much does the test cost? And supposing it’s positive, how much does the fix cost?” The doctor says $50, and $500. The woman takes out her checkbook.
Of course this is not happening anywhere in the U.S.A. right now. If my understanding of the state of current research is correct, however, it might very well be happening on a daily basis ten years from now.
Byers, Dylan (April 7, 2012). National Review fires John Derbyshire.Politico https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/04/national-review-fires-john-derbyshire-119887
Derbyshire, John (April 05, 2012). The Talk: Nonblack Version http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire/ [archive]
Derbyshire, John (November 16, 2003). Culture wars: Report from Derb bunker. National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_11_16_corner-archive.asp [archive]
Derbyshire, John (June 12, 2003). The Man Who Would Be Late. National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_06_08_corner-archive.asp [archive]
Derbyshire, John June 30, 2003. Lost in the Male. National Review, pp. 51-52. https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/lost-in-the-male/
Conway, Lynn (2003). Who is John Derbyshire? by Lynn Conway http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Derbyshire/Who-is-JD.html
Conway, Lynn (2003). Full text and commentary by Lynn Conway http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Derbyshire/DerbyshireReview.html
Sonia John is a translator and activist who helped translate large parts of this site. John also wrote some interesting essays during the J. Michael Bailey book scandal.
Bailey is an evolutionary psychologist, a controversial ideology that believes “counting number of descendants one leaves” is the ultimate measure of human “fitness.” In evolutionary psychology, LGBT people are among those who are “a big mistake” in terms of evolution.
Transgenderism: Fertility and the Ancient Texts
by Sonia John, 2003
For a number of years I had a friend from Germany living in my city while she was pursuing a degree in International Relations. A philosophical type from an early age, when she was about ten she asked her grandfather, who raised and butchered pigs for a living, what was the purpose of life. He answered, “reproduction.”
I think that one of the reasons GLBT people threaten the world view of the conservative sectors of societies is because of low GLBT reproductive rates. The imperative to reproduce, to assure the survival of the ego, family, clan, tribe, nation, etc., is so firmly ingrained in our biology and culture that most people scarcely think about it. This is scarcely surprising, because through most of human history survival was often in doubt, but this is not a threat that has obtained in most of the world in modern times. Nonetheless, lowered fertility is one tangible and emotionally-felt answer some would give to the question, “what harm do GLBT people really cause society?”
Although ZPG (zero population growth) as a political movement has always been very marginal, invisible almost everywhere, its goal has nonetheless been met–and very alarmingly to some, exceeded–in a few European countries, and that goal is close at hand in some other Eruopean countries as well. If it weren’t for the influx of immigrants, who have higher fertility rates than the native-born, the US and Canada would probably also be at or on the verge of ZPG. All of this fertility reduction has occurred by voluntary action, without the assistance of plagues or war, and unlike most previous fertility declines, it has occurred in an environment of peaceful prosperity.
As usual, a trend such as this has first been manifested in the “advanced” societies. Many people assume that a decline in fertility will also eventually occur in the less-advanced societies but that strong population growth will still be the norm there for at least a number of decades. This situation is tailor-made for xenophobes, whether grounded in fears of racial, cultural, military or economic eclipse. Up to this point, it has mainly been conservative religious groups, abetted at times by ultra-nationalistic political elements, that have labored in vain to limit the use of fertility-reducing technology, finding their justifications in ancient religious texts. But a wider variety of conservative groups are also pro-natalist because they–and a great many others who would not necessarily identify themselves as conservative–view perpetual population growth as a fundamental requirement for the financial well-being of businesses, governments, and eventually, according to the rosy scenario, individuals.
Although the bulk of the decline in population growth in the developed countries can be attributed to popular birth control practices, a certain amount of it is also likely the consequence of greater acceptance of gay and lesbian people–and now, the transgender. Given the more relaxed contemporary attitudes toward homosexuality, marriages of convenience (and whatever children are thereby produced) occur much less frequently. The same is increasingly true for transgender people, especially as they are now coming to understand their own nature at earlier stages of their lives.
It is perhaps understandable that the emergence and acceptance of transgender individuals, above all the others in the GLBT grouping, would most viscerally alarm fertility advocates because the chemical and surgical interventions transpeople typically undertake significantly impair or destroy their procreative capabilities. If it were possible to change one’s genitalia and body chemistry and not lose the natural ability to procreate–as in some distant imagined future–transpeople might be much less alarming to the overall pro-natalist society.
The concern about fertility also is important in understanding resistance to liberalizing marriage laws. The purpose of the institution of marriage is seen by many people as primarily a framework and an incentive for reproduction. For many, a childless marriage is still seen as an unfulfilled and pointless one, just as is sexual intercourse with no immediate procreative purpose. Childlessness after a certain age–regardless of marital status–is still often seen as tragic and as an affront to established norms of masculinity and femininity. These attitudes easily find their way into legislation, such as that which narrowly restricts the definition of marriage and which furnishes significant tax incentives to child-bearing.
It’s also understandable that some biologists would become involved in the debates about GLBT people. The persistence in the population of GLBT individuals–long viewed as a relatively inconsequential minority–has been a puzzle for biology because it seems to contradict Darwinian tenets. But now, with growing awareness of the true number of GLBT people and the “problem” they represent for fertility, the concerns of biologists with conservative leanings have acquired an additional urgency.
The controversy over the causes of GLBTism, which is likely to continue apace over the next decades, informs the attitudes of various interest groups that are concerned with public policy on GLBT issues. There is some tantalizing but as yet no conclusive evidence that the presence or expression of GLBTism is caused principally by genetic or biochemical factors, but some features of the gender-variant landscape are well-established:
1. GLBT individuals are generally the offspring of non-GLBT parents;
2. GLBT parents are likely to give birth to non-GLBT children;
3. GLBT individuals exist in all societies and represent approximately the same proportion of populations everywhere;
4. GLBT individuals, in their majority, can be induced by the forceful application of social, legal, etc. pressures to conform to societal norms, including procreation.
Point #4 above is crucial because it has almost always been the means by which societies, absent until recently any knowledge of modern genetics, have handled their “undesirable” GLBT members. It is a major point of agreement by all who object to GLBT expression, whether they view it as an innate characteristic or as a sinful choice inspired by some devil figure.
It is likely that some dream of having the potential to intervene in genetic processes to reduce the number of GLBT individuals who are born, and this capability may emerge during our lifetimes; whether its application would ever become accepted as ethical is an open question. It may also be that there are extremists plotting organized genocidal strategies against GLBT people, but such plans stand, in my opinion, little chance of success in the constitutional democracies that govern in most developed countries today. This is not to say that these eventualities are impossible, and so it is worthwhile to have alert sentinels who are willing monitor the activities of fringe groups as well as the progress and application of potentially unethical scientific research.
In a political environment that forecloses options of being able to directly control the number and specific types of people who are to be born, traditional and conservative elements are limited to advocating general pro-natalist policies that reward those who express a preferred behavior, along with repressive and stigmatizing policies to deal with those whose behavior they do not sanction. The struggle over these policies represents the working out of social and cultural evolution rather than of biological evolution, which requires many millennia.
It may be true that the majority of people everywhere resist change in their lives, particularly when they believe that change will degrade any advantaged position they may hold. In the early days of NASA, during a congressional hearing on the possible benefits of including women in the astronaut corps, John Glenn stated, “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” Note that he did not say that this was a happy or unhappy fact, nor did he justify the status quo by appealing to any authority to rationalize it; he was like many complacent advantaged people who simply say “what is, is.” However, it would not technically be correct to say that conservatives always resist change, because many desire to change back to the way things were in the past (one may pick from a wide variety of defunct utopian eras). Also, conservatives heartily endorse evolution in the labor market of capitalist economic systems. What conservatives rarely ever do want is a forward movement of social evolution, even though it is in social evolution that the human race excels as a means of confronting the unpredictable challenges of life on this planet. The main reason for this is that social evolution has the greatest potential for altering the existing power structure, which continues to involve men holding most of the power and women performing most of the duties of reproduction and child-rearing.
It has never been enough for conservatives who are attempting to influence social policy to state, as John Glenn did, that a particular status quo merely exists and therefore should be preserved; with all of the urgent attacks on the contemporary social order, an appeal to a higher authority is necessary. For the religious side of the conservative house, the ancient scriptural texts suffice as unassailable authority, but belief in religious authority is not what it once was–for many people it has been supplanted to a significant degree by a belief in science. The challenge thus for conservatives is to find scientific authority for their wish to preserve the social status quo, and certain biologists have heeded their call by appealing, in a very biased way, to the most ancient text of them all–the human genome. But what does the human genome really say about how human beings should evolve? Does the genome have an intelligence, does it have preferences? Is this much different from asking if the earth “cares” about whether its atmospheric composition is X or Y, or whether it is the home to a greater or lesser number of plant and animal species? These are, in the end, unresolvable theological debates that obscure the reality that imputed evolutionary preferences are nothing more than the preferences of individuals living today. The important debate is about the kind of people and society we want to have in the future, and this debate can’t be limited to self-appointed scientific or theological Brahmins–everyone, especially the members of the GLBT communities, must participate in it.
We do know that the human genome is an extraordinarily complex system and that we have only just begun to grasp a few of the mechanics of its functioning. We also know that it is intricately connected by an ecological web to the genomes of other organisms and also to the physical environment, all of which also change over time. Then, we know that it is the nature of the genome to produce an enormous diversity of individuals and that this contributes greatly to its stability and capacity to adjust to changing circumstances–the vulnerabilities of monocultures are well-known. Finally, we take as a given that the genome ought to be allowed to continue to evolve, but the main question here has become, “under whose guidance, if under anyone’s?”
With the advance of technology, our species’ potential to effect change in the biosphere–which includes the human genome–is increasing more and more rapidly. Decisions about whether and how to employ this potential have typically been made by those who possess the technology, for the primary benefit of their own groups and in view of their own short moment of time. Long-term considerations have frequently been neglected, as have been considerations of impacts on human outsider groups, non-human groups, and the physical environment.
There has been a genetic experiment of significant scale–an intervention in the human genome–proceeding for a number of years now in several Asian countries. Using simple technology, many families have been selectively aborting female fetuses to the extent that in some areas of India, for example, 55% or more of the children being born are male. This means that for every thousand children born in these areas, there is an excess of one hundred males who will not be able to find mates, assuming the continuation of the prevalent social norms of monogamy and heterosexuality. Though the government in these areas opposes this sex-selection, the majority of the populace does not, and so it continues, albeit in the shadows. Does anyone have a clear idea of the full ramifications of such an unbalanced ratio between the sexes? To a greater or lesser degree, a preference for male children characterizes most human societies in the world today, and far more advanced (as well as less brutal) technology for sex-selection of children is available in the developed countries, though at a price most in India cannot afford. Even granting that preferences for male children are less pronounced here than in India and the technology less-often utilized, what justification is there for allowing (or alternatively, banning) this technology which contravenes the genome’s natural output of an approximate parity between males and females?
I would suggest that society has a serious and legitimate interest in limiting or even prohibiting the use of technology in this way. Furthermore, I would view this technology as “a solution in search of a problem,” whose application is driven mainly by the profit motive. Maintaining parity in the sex ratio of newborns is viewed by most as beneficial for societies, but individuals desire exceptions for themselves because of social and cultural beliefs that can also have financial implications; this is where individuals’ rights must be weighed against the collective long-term well-being of societies. This situation also illustrates the folly of necessarily equating a beneficial collective genetic outcome with the sum of the genetic outcomes preferred by the individuals within that society. A much more satisfactory solution to the “problem” of those who desire to avoid having female children (and one far less fraught with unforeseen consequences) involves addressing the societal reasons that male children are so inordinately preferred, even if the required adjustments to the social status quo might be temporarily wrenching.
In a similar way, many of the thoughts and theories emanating from confederations such as the Human Biodiversity Group seem to be “solutions in search of a problem,” appealing to popular prejudices and dislikes such as the Indian parent’s dislike of having “too many” daughters. With respect to GLBT people, once more the question has to be asked, “what harm do they really do to society?” Clearly, on the positive side, they have made innumerable brilliant contributions to society. On the negative side, is there evidence that they are particularly given to destructive or criminal behavior? This is a case that cannot be made, especially with the understanding that the HIV pandemic is not solely a GLBT phenomenon.
Consider, then, a research or position paper outlining the present scientific understanding of the etiology of disease (regardless of whether the focus is on genetic or microbial causation, or both), continues with speculation about what this might mean for ameliorating an additional disease or social problem, and then selects the existence of GLBT people as that single important problem (disease). Given the lack of any creditable evidence that GLBT people constitute a societal problem, this selection is tantamount to simply saying “we don’t like them.”
Ordinarily in the modern world problems come to light and are assessed for their severity by considering the cumulative costs associated with them–costs borne by individuals and society as a whole. In some respects an analysis of dollars-and-cents costs may be a crude way to measure a problem, but it is a tool that most people can agree on as a starting point. Preliminary conclusions can thus be reached about the relative importance of any number of social or medical problems–obesity, drug addiction, or violent behavior, for instance. These three are fine examples to contrast with the alleged “problem” of GLBT people, because they too are all considered to have at least some roots in genetic predisposition. In the case of violent behavior, which psychologists are apt to categorize under headings such as “anti-social personality disorder” or “explosive anger syndrome,” enormous costs result, including physical damage to individuals and property, psychological damage to individuals, lost employment productivity, and the expense of treatment, law enforcement and incarceration.
What are we to make of those who pursue an interest in ridding the world of GLBT people when there are so many more serious problems that might be confronted? Is it a simple phobia based essentially on a primeval antipathy toward non-procreative individuals? I believe this to be true, but there is also a related and highly emotional secondary issue in play–the extreme malleability of human sexual and gender behavior. Humans have, in common with other primates, far more sexual energy than is required merely for reproduction, and this energy is often expressed in non-procreative–including same-sex–activity depending on the individual and the social situation. Likewise with gender, given the notoriously arbitrary and shifting precepts of gender normality, variance in this dimension occurs in all shadings depending in part on the time and place. In effect, it’s entirely likely that the majority of the human population is “queer” to some extent. If this is true and it becomes common knowledge, both the technical and political feasibility of a genetic intervention fades to nothing. This is the principal reason that anti-GLBT eugenics advocates place such great emphasis on minimizing the count of GLBT people and on denying the existence of bisexuality: their program requires a small and very clearly definable minority.
Despite their different belief systems, in the end what the restless conservative scientists object to is the same as what religious conservatives object to: not wayward genetic evolution, but “undesirable” social evolution. Both groups abhor the idea that society could change so as to include and accommodate GLBT people. For them, this means the end of the world as they know it.
I received the following response from Kristina-Maia DeMott:
Reproduction rates cycle up and down regardless of popular, political, socially conscious, and religious movements to manipulate them. Julian Huxley predicted in the 1930s (“What Dare I Think” was the book) that the reproductive rates of the UK and Western Europe would hit a low in the 1970-80s. Many things were factored into Huxley’s work, along with all known earlier reproductive data curves. Indeed, we are now at the bottom of this predicted curve, if a bit beyond the date horizon. Still, pretty good work for 70-odd years ago.
Social factors and cycles have much to do with declining birthrates in the general populace as technology succeeds, including the Veblenian concept of conspicuous consumption by the upwardly mobile (the ‘me’ generation DINKS, for instance) leading to a disapproval of large families, since urban-dwelling children cannot lend functional support to the family in leaner times as a pig-farmer’s children would, with their ability to take on crucial farming chores at an early age. Having large families decreases the financial ability to amass physical tokens that emulate the trappings of a higher-class lifestyle (these days it’s imported autos, technical toys, expensive pets, vacation properties, designer clothing, etc.). Still, the drive to reproduce emerges later, leading to things like the current upsurge in 50-something parents with only-children in 1st grade. These longer generations of well-off children will function as a gene-preservation vehicle, something unforeseen, but also create social consequences in a decade or so when children reared under “Me Generation” home attitudes find themselves in college with the children of Generation Xers. Hmm … I feel a movie script coming on: “Escape from the Gated Community”? In any case, mid-20th Century ponderers could not have foreseen GLBT people as a factor in any population trend, although it had been noted that ‘dandyism’ (covert homosexuality) and other factors such as inbreeding did lead to low birthrates among the Euro nobility, and even in much earlier times, as in the population decline in upper classes of the Roman Empire.
What we ARE in the midst of, during this “population bust,” is a swing upward of the fundamentalist religious and nationalist pendulum worldwide. Fundamentalists of nearly all religions, along with zealots for national and racial supremacies, will support a strong mandate for reproduction of their OWN kind. This always seems to happen around the time reproductive rates hit a low, like a spark plug starting a motor. These groups will push, in competition with others, for having as many children as they can, in order to increase the influence of their own “correct” offspring — this was the gist of the National Socialist “Bund Maedel” agenda, it also appears to be a component of the “family values”-fixation being promoted in the US.
While it may be handy propaganda to stigmatize GLBT individuals in general for not following “God’s laws,” for not being reproductively active, still, as a whole the socially ultraconservative are not in favor of reproduction by the “godless” or the “inferior.” Whether they believe in Darwinian evolution or not, most fundamentalists do accept the gene theory of inherited traits. GLBTs represent for them the kind of people that they — and here add the social Darwinist eugenicists, devolutionists, etc. — would rather see thinned out of the gene pool. It follows that what upsets them is not GLBT individuals’ low birthrates, rather it is the potential of sperm-donor babies and surrogate births to married gay, lesbian, and transgender couples that will pass the “nonconformist gene” (of whatever kind) down the generations, compounding the “problem” as they see it.
What they don’t want to accept is the fact that the human race is slowly becoming gender-depolarized, on a grand evolutionary and genetic scale, despite attempts to continue the increasing sexual polarization of society in media. Why do the conservative-owned media (don’t whimper, they really are … conservative-owned that is) care so much about, put so much money into, establishing cookie-cutter supergendered figures like Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears, Brad Pitt and George Clooney? Because they preserve remnants of an image that is passing away. Schwarzenegger as Saviour. To take another small example of the kneejerk reaction: to see the hand of the would-be social engineer at work, one has only to look at the public-relations hoopla surrounding the resurgence of the “man’s man image” in the supposed rebirth of the conservative Brooks Brothers clothing stores. What was different? They make more women’s suits now. Wish I could afford one.
But it won’t last. This is the tide they cannot hold back, and cross-gendering will become so much more common in the future that today’s anti-GLBT bigots will seem as silly as the farmer yelling at the automobilist, “Get a Horse!”
References
1. Bailey interview on KOOP-FM, Austin, TX May 2003.
gender role and orientation as male or female, established while growing up
making biased claims about trans women:
Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969)
“devious, demanding and manipulative” and incapable of love (1970)
John Money should have died in prison along with other “leading lights” of late 20th-century sexology. The astonishing lack of accountability or responsibility makes him easily the most unethical sexologist in history.
John Money vs. J. Michael Bailey
Takes one to know one, they say.
John Money was an ethically-challenged sexologist at Johns Hopkins whose work led to the woes of untold intersex people around the world until his “science” was debunked and his academic misconduct exposed.
Mike Bailey is an ethically-challenged sexologist at Northwestern whose work nearly led to the woes of untold transgender people around the world until his “science” was debunked and his academic misconduct exposed.
John Money put out a book in May 1990 with the title:
The similarities in titles certainly beg a comparison, as do the remarkable similarities in the lives of the two well-known sexologists.
Why would Bailey and friends replace “in-between” with “lying”? Below is a very interesting passage from pages 108-110 of John Money’s Gay, Straight, and In-Between: The Sexology of Exotic Orientation.
“Gender Crosscoding”
by John Money
Among adolescents who circumvent homosexual activity or who quit in panic, there are some who coerce themselves into heterosexuality, only to find as husbands and fathers (or wives and mothers, in the case of females) that the lid on Pandora’s box springs open. These are the people who, when young adulthood advances into midlife, begin the homosexual stage of sequential bisexuality. For some the transition is to homosexual relations exclusively, whereas for others heterosexual relations also may continue. The transition may take place autonomously, or it may be a sequel to the divorce or death of the spouse or to sexual apathy in the marriage. When the youngest child leaves home, there may be a degree of freedom hitherto unavailable. The bisexualism of a parent is not transmitted to the offspring, and is not contagious. However, to avoid offending a heterosexual child, a bisexual parent may be self-coerced into suppressing homosexual expression.
The late expression of homosexuality in sequential bisexuality may be associated with recovery from illness and debilitation (e.g., recovery from alcoholism) that had masked the homosexual potential. Hypothetically, it might, conversely, be associated with premature illness and deterioration from brain injury or disease, as in temporal lobe trauma and Alzheimer’s disease. However, although brain pathology may release the expression of sexuality formerly strictly self-prohibited as indecent or immoral, it is not especially associated with releasing bisexuality.
In sequential bisexuality, the transition from homosexual to heterosexual expression is also known to occur autonomously in adulthood. Since this transition is socially approved and not registered as pathological, it is not likely to be recorded. If the individual were at the time in some type of treatment, the transition might be wrongly construed as a therapeutic triumph.
More than sequential bisexuality, concurrent bisexuality may be jocularly considered as having the best of two possible worlds. But it has a dark and sinister potential also. Its most malignant expression is in those individuals in whom it takes the form of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The split applies not simply to heterosexuality and homosexuality, but to good and evil, licit and illicit, as well. The two names are not gender-coded as male and female as they are in the two names of the tranvsvestophile, nor are the two personalities and the two wardrobes. Instead, the two names, wardrobes, and personalities are both male (or in the less likely case of women, female), but one, the given name with its wardrobe and personality, is for the heterosexual, and the other, an alias or a nickname, for the homosexual. The heterosexual personality is the servant of righteousness and the acolyte of a vengeful God. The homosexual personality is the servant of transgression and a fallen angel in the legions of Lucifer. The heterosexual personality has the pontificating mission of a sadistic grand inquisitor, bent on the exorcism of those possessed of homosexuality, himself included. The homosexual personality has the absolving mission of officiating indulgences in the place of masochistic penances for homosexuality, but only for himself and nobody else.
The absolute antithesis of homophobia and homophilia in this malignant form of bisexuality takes its toll in self-sabotage and the sabotage of others. Self-sabotage is an ever-present threat that materializes if there is a leakage of information from those in one antithetical world to those in the other. The greater danger is, of course, that knowledge of the illicit homosexual existence will leak out to the society that knows only of the heterosexual existence. The ensuing societal abuse and deprivation, legal and social, may be extreme.
The sabotage of others is carried out professionally by some individuals with the syndrome of malignant bisexualism. Their internal homophobic war against their own homosexuality becomes externalized into a war against homosexuality in others. The malignant bisexual becomes a secret agent, living in his own private and secret homosexual world, while spying on its inhabitants, entrapping them, assaulting and killing them, or, with less overt violence, preaching against them, legislating against them, or judicially depriving them of the right to exist.
The malignant bisexual is the perfect recruit for the position of homosexual entrapment officer or decoy in the employ of the police vice squad. Supported by clandestine operations, blackmail, and threats of exposure, in espionage or in the secret police of government surveillance, he may achieve legendary power, such as that attributed to J. Edgar Hoover of mythical FBI fame.
People in high places may have the power to keep under cover for a lifetime, with the homosexual manifestations of their bisexuality never exposed. Others have their career blown, as did the bisexual former U.S. congressman from Maryland, Robert E. Bauman, a fanatical homophobic ultraconservative of the religious new right, who subsequently published a biography of his own downfall (Bauman 1986).
Bauman was exposed by a combination of surveillance and the testimony of a paid informant and blackmailer. Nowadays there is a hitherto nonexistent way of being suspected or exposed, namely by dying of AIDS. This is what happened to Roy Cohn (New York Times, August 3, 1986), the malignantly bisexual legal counsel for the homosexual witch hunter from Wisconsin, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, himself suspected of malignant bisexuality. Together, they destroyed the lives of many American citizens, simply by publicly accusing them of being homosexual, falsely or otherwise.
…
Scratch the surface of the self-righteous and find the devil. This is a maxim of widespread acceptability, not only to the self-righteous in high places of homophobic power, influence, and authority, but also to the homophobic, gay-bashing hoodlums who, as in the case with which this section began, pick up or are picked up by a gay man, have sex with him, and then exorcise their own homosexual guilt by assaulting and maybe killing him. Both versions of homophobia are manifestations of malignant bisexuality that, in an interview with the journalist, Doug Ireland, for New York Magazine (July 24, 1978), I called the exorcist syndrome.
There must be a very widespread prevalence of lesser degrees of the exorcist syndrome in the population at large. If it were not so, otherwise-decent people would not persecute their homosexual fellow citizens nor tolerate their persecution. Instead they would live and let live those who are destined to have a different way of being human in love and sex. They would tolerate them as they do the left-handed. Tolerance would remove those very pressures that progressively coerce increasing numbers of our children and grandchildren to grow up blighted with the curse of malignant bisexuality.
Bullough, Vern L. “The contributions of John Money: a personal view.” The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 40, no. 3, 2003, pp. 230–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490309552186
John Money and John G. Brennan, “Heterosexual vs. homosexual attitudes: male partners’ perception of the feminine image of male transsexuals,” The Journal of Sex Research, 6, 3 (1970): 193–209, 201, 202. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224497009550666
Downing, Lisa; Morland, Iain; Sullivan, Nikki (26 November 2014). Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Goldie, Terry (2014). The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money. Vancouver, British Columbia: University of British Columbia Press.
Money, John; Hampson, Joan G; Hampson, John (October 1955). “An Examination of Some Basic Sexual Concepts: The Evidence of Human Hermaphroditism”. Bull. Johns Hopkins Hosp. Johns Hopkins University. 97 (4): 301–19. PMID 13260820.
“David Reimer, 38, Subject of the John/Joan Case”. The New York Times. 12 May 2004. Retrieved 27 September 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/us/david-reimer-38-subject-of-the-john-joan-case.html
R Green, J Money – Archives of General Psychiatry, 1966
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
Vaush is the stage name of Ian Kochinski, and American media personality supportive of trans and gender diverse people.
Background
Kochinski was born on February 14, 1994 in Los Angeles and grew up in Beverly Hills. Kochinski earned a bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University in 2018.
Kochinski became known for debating conservative people and conspiracy theorists, including Stefan Molyneux, Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), Tomas Bogardus, and Debra Soh.
